Spinal Cord Injury Program has beaten those odds. Take Mamaille, for example. She’s

a 16-year-old female patient who was crushed by a falling building at a school in Port-Au-Prince during the earthquake. Her family thought she was dead. But Mamaille was brought to St. Boniface’s Spinal Cord Injury Program and now, three years after the injury, she’s thriving in a program that off ers her psychological counseling, physical therapy, schooling, wound care and, most importantly, a supportive com- munity. St. Boniface’s ability to provide this

PHOTO COURTESY ST. BONIFACE

Betsy Sherwood hugs a young patient from the St. Boniface Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation and Community Reintegration Program.

tation, phase one of the EHR go-live was successful. Because St. Boniface selected a cloud-based service, the EHR had a light footprint. No on-site infrastructure – such as traditional software servers and cables, or local IT staff – was needed. T e connection from a nearby cell tower was able to deliver a strong signal, allowing the ability to connect to the Internet and to the EHR service. T e ease of adoption of a cloud-based service allowed St. Boniface to rapidly implement the new solution. For one thing, they were starting with a clean slate, so physicians had nothing to “unlearn” about other electronic systems. In training, the rehabilitation staff employed a creative way to learn the system by competing to see who could log in and enter test-patient data the fastest. Winners would give a big “fi st pump” when the task was completed. Not only were they gaining cloud-based knowledge, but they were doing so in an engaging, effi cient fashion. Participants today are very proud to be on the cutting edge of healthcare delivery in Haiti and remain eager to learn professional skills to deliver better care. Patient progress to recovery has proven the success of the EHR. In developing-world countries such as Haiti, life expectancy for spinal cord injury victims is about one year, at best. As for St. Boniface, all but one of the 62 patients in the

level of care, sustain it and replicate it for other patients in a rural environment with little infrastructure is made pos- sible with a cloud-based EHR service. As the popularity of cloud services grows, providers will continue to ask questions and, hopefully, will look to St. Boniface as a shining example of what can be accomplished under the most challenging circumstances.